The song I lost to a Ghost

The Song I Lost to a Ghost

Last night I didn't go to bed a satisfied guy. A gruesome error I made while refining a code became so catastrophic that I just gave up. Sleep came, but never lasted. By 4am, I was awake, just after a few hours, wondering about what might have gone wrong. A fresh look at the lines brought a bug to light, and within 70 minutes, I was done, ready to go back to sleep. Not knowing a bewildering surprise was waiting for me on the other side of consciousness.

It started the same way good dreams always start; without warning, without asking permission, without giving a disclaimer.

I was somewhere rural, far deeper in the countryside, in a location I only stayed in for the few minutes I was dreaming. In an open air, the kind of dust-and-dusk light that doesn't really exist anywhere except in exotic dreams and estranged childhood memories. 

There was music. Not music I was listening to, the music I was inside of. The music composed of verses and choruses, in a language only a dream could create so immaculately.

Three people were singing. With the lead singer being the local gengetone veteran from my tribe. But tribal lines don't apply in dreams, because his Luhya proficiency in the dream was all of a sudden flawless. The supporting leads weren't as gripping, at least during the start. When the main lead’s performances made my conscience want to stay dreaming a little longer. 

The first verses came first, big and upbeat, band-centric, the kind of sound that makes your chest move before your feet do. I didn't understand any of what he was singing. Not because it was hard to. But because his language wasn't mine. It didn't matter. It was good, and some part of me, the writer part, the part that's always half-listening to my dream adventures for the next sentence I'll need for my book, knew it immediately: this is worth keeping.

Then the chorus part came. An eccentric child stepped up to sing it. While ash tattooed his black face from maintaining a three-stone-fire nearby. The chemistry was high, the vibe was peaking, and the vibe was quickly shifting from classic entertainment to unscripted euphoria. 

Somewhere in his verse, he slipped, one line, suddenly, in my language. Like a secret handshake. It landed, without trying too hard to be seen, without trying too hard to hide. Just there, staring at the audience with pure confidence. The audience who were amazed, who were not really there, whose voices and discreet chatter only served to intensify how beautifully the single multilingual joke landed. And everyone around me laughed. Not at him. With him. It was the kind of laugh that means: we see you, we know you, this is ours too.

I laughed too. And then, suddenly, the way it always happens to me in dreams, a second consciousness clicked on inside the first one. I knew I was dreaming. I knew this song existed nowhere but here, in this exact seconds-long window, and if I didn't wake up and grab my phone voice recorder, fast, before it's gone, I would lose it.

This isn't new for me. It happens with my books all the time. A sentence usually arrives fully formed in the dark behind my closed, rapidly moving eyes, and I always know, with total certainty, that it's a piece of something I'm building, a piece of something the plot needs. Something I can't trust my brain to hold till morning. So I keep a pen and a notebook by the bed now. Not out of superstition. Out of experience. 

Because this works. I wake, I scribble one, two, three words or just one line of dialogue, and I go back under, and in the morning I find the line sitting there, waiting for me like a gift I left for myself.

So that's what I tried to do this time. Wake up. Grab the phone. Record the tune before the tune forgot itself.

I never got the chance. 

The nightmare didn't ask to come in. It just arrived, just the way the phantom demon arrived — already there, already behind me, before I had any say in the matter. It didn't bother explaining their intent. Was it a man? a woman? A granny? A child? No, not a child, for sure. The height of the creature that snarled on my bed covered in a pale bedsheet that I never had when I ran to switch on the lights doesn't qualify to be a child.

One second I was laughing at a boy's smooth lyrical pivot in a beautiful song. The next, I was lying in my own bed, in the dark, and the lights were off, and I could not move. Not "I didn't want to move." I could not turn around. It's like my body was glued on the bed, right from deep down in my bones. The only sensory details I could process was that of someone lying behind me on the bed. Their horrific presence was unmistakable, worsened by my immobility.

I heard my mother's voice, calling out from somewhere, not beside me, not in the room with me, just present, the way voices are present in dreams, everywhere and nowhere, telling me, almost like a distressed warning: don't look behind you.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because I think it's the detail that makes this dream sharper than an ordinary fright. It wasn't a stranger's warning. It was my mother's. The person who is supposed to protect me was the one telling me that the only protection available was not looking. That whatever was behind me was something even she couldn't fully shield me from, only warn me about.

So, as a compliant child I always was, I didn't look. For a while, I just lay there, frozen, feeling a presence at my back that had no business being there, while my own bed turned into the most dangerous place in the world.

Finally, because my dream-logic always eventually pushes me toward the thing I'm avoiding, I turned around.

It wasn't there. Maybe fled, maybe vanished, maybe just became invisible, maybe wasn't there in the first place. But its presence was all over the place. I got up. I went to turn the lights on. They didn't turn on. They couldn't turn on.

I want to be clear about what that felt like, because it felt stranger than ordinary dream-fear. It wasn't jump-scare panic. It was confusion first. A flicker of "wait, how is this happening", the specific helplessness of your own hand failing to do the one simple thing it's always done. I tried again. and again, and again, and I told myself, almost stubbornly, ‘no, this time it has to turn on.’ Like I could argue reality back into shape. It didn't listen.

And that's when I knew, inside the dream, that something was wrong in a way that wasn't going to be solved by trying harder. I knew I was in a dream, but that just made it more horrifying since I didn't know how to wake up. The lights became the baseline test for final consciousness, but they kept failing each time I tried before the loop took me back to the bed, with the ghost💀.

Then it appeared again. Something, not fully formed, not fully seen, the way nightmare-things never quite let you look directly at them, flickering in and out behind my bed, on the mattress, inside the mattress itself, like the bed had become a kind of skin with something moving underneath it.

I don't remember deciding to pray. It just happened, the way breathing happens. This short, old prayer verse I memorized back when I was very little. I was shouting it, somewhere between my throat and the dream's throat, urgent and childlike, the exact prayers I hadn't actively used in years surfacing whole and ready, like they'd been kept somewhere safe the whole time, waiting for exactly this.

And then I was standing on the floor. Not in the bed anymore. Just standing, in the dark, having apparently escaped the thing without ever really confronting it.

Suddenly something happened, a speck of reality slipped in, I felt the weight of my premium blanket on my head, lifted my hand to tuck it away, then I opened my eyes to see the flicker of night-light coming from the window. I closed my eyes once more just to make sure I could do it. That's when I woke up. For real, this time. 

Here's the part that I think is funnier, and sadder, than the demon itself. 

I woke up gasping, praying, fully reset to what I can only call my factory settings: the Christian-raised kid who knew exactly which words to say when something behind the bed wasn't supposed to be there. Years of city living, years of quietly drifting from the beliefs I grew up with, building a life that doesn't really have room for demons in it anymore and none of that mattered the second I needed it to. The old software booted right back up, instantly, like it had never been uninstalled. Just sitting there in standby the whole time.

And yet, lying there afterward, genuinely awake, heart still doing whatever hearts do after that, I didn't feel scared. Not even a bit. In fact, I felt almost amused at myself. Because I now don't believe in demons. Not really. Not the way I used to. So what was I so afraid of, ten seconds ago, that I was praying like a child?

Despite being still dark, I still haven't turned the lights on. I still haven't looked under the bed. Not because I think there's something there, I want to be very clear about that, but because some small, ten-minutes-awake part of me is enjoying not checking. There's a kind of dare in it. The Wi-Fi router is blinking its usual yellow. Vehicles are passing on the road outside, doing the completely mundane work of confirming that the world is still the world. I know the light will turn on. I know it with the same certainty I knew, in the dream, that it wouldn't.

That gap, between what I know and what I just lived through, is the whole story, honestly.

But the thing that actually stings, the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I struggle to move on from, isn't the demon at all. It's the song.

The demon I can write off as adrenaline, old beliefs surfacing, a strange architecture my brain built out of leftover religious imagery and whatever stress I'm carrying that I haven't named yet. It'll fade. It already has, mostly. 

The song won't come back.

I had something, a real, structured, three-part song, in two languages, with a joke built into the bones of it, a piece of culture and humor and rhythm my own brain assembled out of nowhere while I slept, and I lost it to a ghost I don't even believe in. Not metaphorically. Literally: I was one nightmare away from recording it. 

I have done this before, successfully, with sentences for my books, kept a pen by the bed for exactly this reason, woken at 3 a.m. to scribble one line of dialogue I knew the plot needed, gone back to sleep, found it waiting for me in the morning like proof that the system works.

This time the system got interrupted. The fear got there first.

I don't know if I'll ever get the tune back. Probably not.

Dream music rarely survives contact with full consciousness, and mine had the added bad luck of being chased out by something with claws. So this is me, instead, writing down what I can still hold onto: the shape of it. The boy's verse. The laugh that wasn't mockery. My mother's voice telling me not to look. The lights that wouldn't turn on, twice, and the third time I didn't even bother trying after the third attempt. I can't play you the song. But I can tell you it was good. 

And I can tell you that somewhere in my own head, three people are still singing it, in a place I can't get back to, and a ghost is still standing at the foot of a bed that, by now, I should probably go check under.

I won't. Not yet. I think I'm going back to sleep😁